“This is a badly needed book. Suffering is the hardest of all issues for Christian theology, and the suffering of nonhuman creatures is a neglected area of theology. Southgate offers a learned and moving contribution to this field. He writes with a passion for the creatures of Earth and for God.” —Denis Edwards, School of Theology, Flinders University, Australia, and author of Ecology at the Heart of Faith (2006)
Pain, suffering, and extinction are intrinsic to the evolutionary process. In this book Christopher Southgate shows how the world that is very good is also groaning in travail and subjected by God to that travail. Southgate then evaluates several attempts at evolutionary theodicy and argues for his own approachan approach that takes full account of Gods self-emptying and human beings special responsibilities as created cocreators.
Christopher Southgate is Honorary University Fellow in Theology at the University of Exeter, England, and Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Originally trained as a biochemist at the University of Cambridge, he is the general editor and principal author of
God, Humanity and the Cosmos (3rd ed.).
